Umbra 3 To Power The Witcher 3 & Destiny, Xbox One Support Officially Announced

DSOGaming writes: "Umbra Software announced today that its Umbra 3 Visibility Solution middleware is available for Xbox One, and that it is being used in upcoming games such as Bungie’s Destiny and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt from CD Projekt RED, and it has been licensed for future projects from such developers as Eidos Montreal and Remedy."

Umbra 3 is an impressive piece of middleware tech. It is used for s/w occlusion culling, which is where in-game renderables are culled out based on whether or not they are completely hidden behind other objects in the visible scene. If they are completely hidden, the engine can avoid doing unnecessary graphics api calls, which are quite costly, as well as to avoid doing gpu processing of geometry that will end up hidden.

As you can see, this is one particular problem within games development, and Umbra tries to be a solution to said problem - it doesn't run as a standalone, which is why it's called middleware. Nowhere in the article is it even suggested that they're referring to an engine.